Deep Dish Pizza and Some Non-Pizza News

Earlier this week the pendulum of our latest Thin Crust Pizza craze swung the other way and we decided to give deep dish a try. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had thick-crust pizza before, but never a pizza PIE so to speak, so we decided to give it a whirl.

One of my great-grandma’s pie dishes. She kept such pristine bakeware, as did my grandmother. It’s one of my favorite pieces, so classic. I really wanted to make it super thick, like you see in pictures and on Food Network, but we don’t really have the bakeware for it, so pie dish it was. Optimally I’d like enough kitchen cabinets to have a good set of cast-iron cookware. Currently I’m storing a good deal of my kitchen inventory in my bathroom closet. Not ideal hospitality when your guests go looking for towels and find your juicer.

We made a batch of the dough we used for La Pizza Margherita Kohler, and added some extra fresh herbs. Tis’ the season after all. We coated the pie dish with oil and a little white cornmeal.

We shredded the cheese (mostly mozzarella with a little colby jack) and sliced some fresh thick-cut pepperoni slices we got fresh from the butcher. So much better than the packaged stuff, I can’t recommend it enough! All Neil’s idea, and a yummy one at that. You only need about 15 slices, we got a little extra for nibbling.

Then you just layer all your ingredients, just like you would in a lasagna. Cheese, sauce, pepperoni, REPEAT! The only bummer was that you really need almost 2x the ingredients you would for a normal pizza in order to fill it up. I wish we had thought ahead, we were scrambling to fill our pie. But how gorgeous it was!

No really, look at it! Sigh…

We baked it at 375° degrees for around 35 minutes. It was like a bed of hot, cheesy lava. Tantalizing in a burn-your-tongue-off sort of way. Glee quickly turned to question, how to get it out of there?

Well, not every shot can be award-winning. The moment we scooped each slice onto the plate, it started to slide, creating a lake of cheese and sauce with tiny pepperoni islands around the plate. Still delicious, just not as picturesque. I think the lesson for next time is stuffing more solid ingredients in it to give it a better form and structure. For those of you unconcerned about the photogenic qualities of your food, ignore this message and completely stuff your face with whatever you feel like.

We made this pie in the midst of our landlords showing our rental house to potential new suitors tenants. That’s right, we’re moving! But, it’s not where you, or we, thought we’d end up. Stay tuned for that update on Monday, we’re excited to finally share!